This summer the Tour de France riders start their 3,656 KM journey in the Yorkshire city of Leeds and complete three whole stages on British...

Wednesday, 21 March 2012

Twitter reaches 6th birthday

Today is Twitter's 6th birthday and on the milestone day for the social networking site it is worth looking at some of the key facts and statistics surrounding their remarkable success.

It is estimated today that Twitter has 532 million registered users and this has made it the 9th most popular site on the planet

Twitter's popularity has risen so much that it now generates 1 billion tweets within a week, it took 3 years, 2 months and a day to reach the first billion tweets.

When the first tweet was made in 2006 the company employed only 5 staff, today it has more than 800 employees.

The network has been used for numerous good causes, when the Wendy's chain tweeted "RT for a good cause. Each retweet send $50c to help kids in foster care" they received over 100,000 retweet's that generated more than $50,000 for charity.

It is now available in 28 languages, the most recent languages to be added are Urdu, Hebrew and Arabic. This has given Twitter a truly global presence.

During the Superbowl 2012 it achieved a record 12,233 tweets per second, demonstrating its usage as a means of real-time communication on current events.

It has facilitated interaction between celebrities and their fans, with the top 10 followers comprising of musicians, film stars and a politician.

Most followed user Lady Gaga has 21,217,501 followers meaning that she has more Twitter fans than the population of Madagascar. Second place Justin Bieber has more followers than the population of Chile with 18,645,233 followers and even 50th placed Conan O'Brian has more followers than the population of Singapore with 5,270,490 followers.